Tennessee football: Jon Gruden, Lane Kiffin and the lesson of splash hires
It’s fitting for Tennessee football that the Jon Gruden controversy would break the same week they are about to face Lane Kiffin. Both coaches serve as a reminder about the dangers of splash hires and why the Vols were right not to hire Hugh Freeze earlier this year.
Gruden just resigned his fourth year into his second stint with the Las Vegas Raiders amidst a slew of emails detailed in The New York Times of him using homophobic, misogynistic and racially insensitive language from 2011 to 2018. The emails emerged as part of a separate workplace misconduct investigation that didn’t directly involve him.
Given how everything went down, it’s safe to say Tennessee football dodged a bullet. If Vol fans got their wish nearly four years ago, they would be dealing with the controversy of these emails while Gruden coaching on Rocky Top.
Remember 2017? Fans killed the hire of Greg Schiano, which was a justified move but in part based on a fierce desire to hire Gruden. Of course, it turned out Gruden wasn’t interested and rejected John Currie, just as he rejected Dave Hart in 2012. Both times, Vols athletic directors were trying to make a splash hire.
Well, it looks like the Vols were lucky to miss out on Gruden. This is why splash hires for the sake of being splash hires don’t work. There’s a lesson in all of them, and athletic directors sometimes go overboard trying to make such a move.
Kiffin is the obvious answer. After firing Phillip Fulmer in 2008, Mike Hamilton hired the recently fired NFL coach who had also coached the Raiders, ironically. The selling point for Kiffin was his youth, the staff he could bring and the brand he had after being an NFL guy who spent years helping to orchestrate the USC Trojans run of the mid-2000s.
However, Kiffin bolted after one year to take the USC job, and he left Tennessee football in a slew of trouble. The attrition combined with multiple NCAA investigations and the biggest whiff of a recruiting class in history, 2009, left Derek Dooley with nothing to work with for three years. UT never really recovered as a program.
At the time, Hamilton passed on much more qualified hires, including Mike Leach, who had just gone 11-2 with the Texas Tech Red Raiders, and Brian Kelly, who had just won the Big East Championship with the Cincinnati Bearcats. He went for splash, and it didn’t work.
Of course, over a decade later, Kiffin is having a solid comeback with the Ole Miss Rebels, but he’s much smarter and has lots more experience. Even if he’s still brash, being fired by USC had to humble him a bit.
Speaking of Ole Miss, this type of toxicity is why Danny White was smart to avoid Hugh Freeze as Jeremy Pruitt’s replacement. Freeze was fired due to numerous violations while at Ole Miss. He may be doing well with the Liberty Flames, where involvement with a sexual misconduct scandal seems like a prerequisite for getting a job, but he would’ve been bad for UT.
White knew that Tennessee football was going to have to deal with an NCAA investigation brought on by Pruitt. The last thing he needed in the process of dealing with that was having a guy fired by another SEC school for major violations, some that seem more serious than what he admitted to.
As a result, White made the smart move hiring Josh Heupel. He’s got a guy whose schemes will bring enough splash and excitement to Vol Nation but who also at least seems to have substance as a head coach.
Truthfully, it’s hard to make a splash hire. Very rarely do you get a home run hire on its face the way the Alabama Crimson Tide did with Nick Saban in 2007. Most of the time, you stumble into it. Dabo Swinney was a promoted assistant by the Clemson Tigers.
This isn’t to say you have to do what Phillip Fulmer did when he hired the most boring style of coach possible in Pruitt, somebody he saw in his image. Being forward-thinking with your hires is helpful. However, you have to be smart with your hires, and Gruden wouldn’t have turned into a disastrous hire for Tennessee football.
Hart may have gotten away with it if he pulled off the hire, as Gruden may not have sent most of those emails had he been coaching UT by that point. You could make a case that if UT had hired Gruden either time, there wouldn’t have been a chain of events that led to this workplace misconduct to expose his emails.
Next. Five reasons Vols and Ole Miss have bad blood. dark
On the other hand, the email about DeMaurice Smith was always out there, and if he had been hired in 2017, those emails always would’ve been stored somewhere, so Tennessee football would have always been at risk. You really would have to question the potential reward from that in hiring a guy who hasn’t coached college ball since 1991.